The working title is Nellie and the Coven of Barbo. It’s an adventure story about being a twelve-year-old girl. There will be some witches.

Here’s the (temporary) blurb:

Cornelia (Nellie) Pike has always believed that she’s an extraordinary person meant to accomplish important things. As she begins seventh grade, she’s haunted by the feeling that something’s not right with the world, especially with her friend Lake – and that maybe it’s her destiny to make things right. But one strange event follows another, and Nellie begins to wonder if her friends, and not she, are the extraordinary ones. What’s a girl to do if she suspects that she’s nothing special, and that this might be her greatest gift?

It’s time again for the list of books that I enjoyed most this year. As always, only some of these books were published in 2014, but they were all a part of my 2014 experience.

This year’s list is compromised slightly by the introduction of the Summer Book Club, a totally fun summer project in which I posted about the best books I read each week. Accordingly, I have linked back to reviews of Summer Book Club favourites, rather than repeating myself. However, there are a few new entries here – I got a little bit of reading done even when I wasn’t on holiday!

1. The Signature of All Things: Elizabeth Gilbert’s blockbuster manages to be a thrilling 500-page adventure story about a 19th-century moss expert. It is amazing. Full review here.

2. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chaz has written and drawn one of the finest graphic memoirs ever, about her struggle to care for her aging and loony parents. Will make you cry; will also make you laugh until you fall off the couch. Full review here.

3. Astonish Me: On the surface, a book about ballet, but really a book about the many manifestations of unrequited love. Full review here. Maggie Shipstead is my best discovery of the year; Seating Arrangements also blew my socks off.

4. The Middlesteins: Jami Attenberg’s family saga about how hard it is to love people, especially when they’re intent on destroying themselves. Full review here.

5. The Secret Place: I was surprised not to see this book get more attention – it did not, for example, show up in the NY Times’ top 100 books of the year – but I may be a bit blind when it comes to Tana French. As I’ve said before, I don’t read a lot of mysteries, but she is a consistent exception. This book is one of my favourites of hers, although that may be due to some of my other biases: I love stories about cliques of teenage girls, and have been a sucker for boarding-school stories since I was a child reading Enid Blyton. In this installment in French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, Holly Mackey – whom we first met as a six-year-old in Faithful Place, which I reread immediately after finishing this one – is now a sullen teenager, and she shows up at the police station with information about a year-old cold case, the murder of a boy her age on her school grounds. The Secret Place unfolds over a single day of interrogation, replete with lots of flashbacks. The thing to love most about French’s books is her characters: Holly, her friends and enemies, her father, the police officer she turns to and his belligerent partner are all seductively drawn, and the atmosphere of menace that hangs over the school is due in large part to the very real teenagers within, and the lengths they will go to to be themselves, regardless of what it will do to others.

6. Asterios Polyp: A dreamlike graphic novel about an architect who floats out of his unraveling life and into a job as a car mechanic in the middle of nowhere. Mysterious and moody, it has haunted me ever since. Full (if brief) review here.

7. The Property: I love Rutu Modan’s graphic novels, and this one is no exception. Her bright, colourful, meticulous panels and her sharp sense of humour illuminate challenging subjects: in this case, a woman and her grandmother visit Warsaw on a mission that turns out not to be what the granddaughter expects. Full review here.

8. The Dinner: I sometimes say that I’m no longer capable of enjoying a book that doesn’t have a sense of humour. I’m not sure whether The Dinner contradicts me or not. If it does have a sense of humour, it’s a very bitter one. It’s difficult to talk about the book without giving too much away, and it’s difficult to put my finger on just what’s so wonderful about it, aside from the easy, clean, yet unsettling narrative voice. Perhaps its greatest strength is its ability to tap into the most unappealing thoughts we’ve ever had. For example: imagine you walk into the only ATM in your neighbourhood, to find your path to the cash machine blocked by a sleeping homeless person and the air to be filled with an odour so vile you have to back out the door. What is your first emotional response, the one you then tamp down because you are a good and empathetic person? What if you were the sort of person who didn’t tamp down this response? That’s what this book is about. It’s impossible to put down.

9. Bark: If you’re a reader and also a writer, you already love Lorrie Moore and don’t need to hear too much more about her. Birds of America is for my money the greatest short story collection of the 20th century. Bark is also great. The conceit – that of the various meanings of the word “bark” – was a bit thin to me, but it doesn’t matter; I kept falling over because of her turns of phrase and wry asides, gems like “My brain’s a chunk of mud next to hers” or “It wasn’t he who was having sex. The condom was having sex and he was just trying to stop it.” (I found those by just opening the book open to random pages. It’s astonishing.)

10. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.: I picked up this book in bookstores a couple of times and put it down again because I thought, Really? We need more books about self-important young male writers dating in Brooklyn? Then I had to go into the hospital for a bit, and for some reason, it struck me as exactly the book I wanted to read. I read the first 100 pages lying in bed waiting for surgery. Then, when I got home, I didn’t pick it up again for several months, until one day I finished a book and didn’t have another new one handy; I plowed through the remainder of it in no time flat. It is the classic problem of the unsympathetic narrator who is revealing truths that may or may not be important – if nothing else, anyone who’s ever been a young heterosexual female artist will recognize Nathaniel and be impressed by Adelle Waldman’s ability to render his inner life so convincingly. I had to admit, once I’d put it down, that I’d really liked this book in spite of myself.

If you are a teacher interested in using books in the classroom – whether you’re a literature teacher or not, and no matter what your grade level – I think you’ll get a lot out of Tara’s blog. Go check it out!

1. … in his final argumentative essay, a student invented a statistic about Columbian drug cartel activity in 2000-2012. He inserted a carefully formatted signal phrase and in-text citation, attributing said statistic to one of several random sources he copy-pasted to his Works Cited page from Wikipedia. The source he cited for this particular fact was Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries.

2. …Rachael Ray explained on one of her shows that “Girl Math” is when you eat a lot of vegetables so that you can eat a lot of things that are not vegetables.

The upshot: everyone, from my students to Rachael Ray, believes that I am a g$%%^*n moron.

Last week, my students were preparing for their first in-class essay, and they were freaking out.

We’re writing commentaries. In a commentary, you read a short text you haven’t seen before and then comment on the themes or effects that the author has produced, and explain how he/she has produced them. Commentaries are hard, but we’ve been working on them for weeks now, and they’re mostly getting the hang of it. Now that they know they’ll be graded, though, they’re panicking.

In one class, a handful sat paralyzed during our final exercise, unable to write anything at all on their paper. I visited each of them periodically, asking them probing questions and nudging them to put something, anything, down. They scratched a few notes, then stared at the page, their faces immobilized.

“Is this ok?” Octavia asked me repeatedly. “Does my thesis statement make sense? If I want to talk about the point of view, can I do that? What should I say?”

“Just write it down,” I said. “We’ll discuss in a few minutes. Just write it down.”

At the end of the practice class, I asked all the students to share what they had come up with, and some seemed to have a handle on things. Others who’d been floundering looked more and more relieved as I wrote thesis after thesis on the board and said, “Yes, this is what you’re after! Please explain! You see, it’s not easy, but with a bit of thought, you can get started.”

I went directly to my other section of the same course, and there, things went south much more quickly and noisily.

I asked them to do the same individual exercise, to be discussed together at the end of class. It was clear that a number of them had no idea where to begin. For a few, this wasn’t surprising: they’d missed classes and previous practice essays and were only now realizing that it was catching up with them. Nevertheless, the instructions were clear, they had a rubric with all of the criteria in front of them, and EVERY SINGLE CLASS SO FAR THIS SEMESTER has been preparation for this essay.

Some students were working diligently away, but most, after a cursory reading of the assigned text and a few moments of simmering silence, began talking to their neighbours. They were on task – they were asking for help, comparing notes, all things that would normally be par for the class. But the noise was growing louder, and the purpose of this exercise was to do the work alone.

I reminded them of this. “Next class, you have to write this essay by yourself. Your neighbour can’t help you. Why aren’t you taking advantage of the practice time right now?”

The grumbles began. “Miss, can we have, like, a five minute discussion after we get the text next class, so we can share our thoughts?”

“No.”

“But miss, it’s hard!”

“Of course it’s hard!” I cried. “If it were easy, there’d be no reason to study it in school!”

But I paused. Something was happening here that I wasn’t acknowledging. What was it? I let them buzz a little longer, and then I marched to the front of the room.

“Listen to me,” I said. They stopped talking.

“I am VERY CONCERNED,” I said. “But it’s not because I don’t think you can do this. I’m concerned because YOU don’t think you can do it. You’re panicking and throwing your hands in the air and not even trying.”

“We’re like the girl in the passage!” Jamila piped up. “She can’t do what she wants, so she just gives up doing anything!”

“You see?” I said. “Jamila and I have been talking for twenty minutes and she’s been saying she doesn’t understand. But see? She understands SOMETHING.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I guarantee you, if you come in next class believing you can’t do it, you won’t be able to do it.”

“Guaranteed!” Zack nodded and pointed through the air at me in a “sing it, sister” gesture.

“But you can do SOMETHING, if you stop worrying about doing it wrong. If you sit there for two hours and write a bunch of notes and come up with a thesis statement or a literary device or anything, you’ll get any points I can give you. Then, when you take it home later to revise, you’ll have something to start the next draft with. You might fail this essay. But if you fail the essay, THE WORLD WILL NOT END.”

Zack raised his hands to the sky. “Thank you miss!” he yelled. “I need to hear that. I do.”

“Just do it. Even if you think your ideas are ridiculous, just write them down. If the draft you do in class doesn’t make any sense, we’ll work on it, and you’ll do it again at home, and maybe next time it will be better. Honestly, guys, if you get out of college not knowing how to write a perfect literary commentary, it’s not a big deal. But if you get out of college knowing that now you can sit with a random text for a couple of hours and come up with some things to say about it, that will be an accomplishment.”

I let them go. I came home exhausted. My New York Sunday Times was still sitting on the table, untouched. I pulled out the Magazine, to discover, on the cover, Paul Tough’s essay “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” In it, he interviews teachers, principals and other educators who believe that “character” – variously defined – is a more important ingredient in long-term life success than academic smarts are.

Tough writes much of his article about the American KIPP schools, charter schools for students in difficulty. KIPP graduates an impressive number of its at-risk students, but followup studies have shown that these students don’t always thrive once they get to college, and a large number don’t complete their degrees. According to one of his subjects,

the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically [at the KIPP schools]; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead…

Another researcher tells him,

…learning is hard. True, learning is fun, exhilarating and gratifying — but it is also often daunting, exhausting and sometimes discouraging. . . . To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect.

Tough, reflecting on these observations, comments that

the struggle to pull yourself through a crisis, to come to terms on a deep level with your own shortcomings and to labor to overcome them — is exactly what is missing for so many students…

According to Tough and some of his subjects, the key ingredient is grit, the ability to persist in the face of obstacles and even failure.

GRIT! I thought. This is what I’ve been saying all along! If I can face down my limitations, if I can labour to be, not perfect, but better – I will be … happy? Is grit something we can learn? If so, how can we teach it?

Two days later, my students were still labouring to be perfect. In my first class, I had to visit Octavia several times. “STOP SECOND-GUESSING YOURSELF,” I told her.

“I know, miss,” she said. “I always do that, always. I don’t know how to stop.”

I don’t know how to help her stop, either. But after I whispered “WRITE IT DOWN” one more time, and walked away, she began writing things down. She filled a couple of pages. I haven’t read them yet, but those pages, regardless of what’s on them, are an achievement.

Teaching them how to write a commentary is all very well, but what is it for? Maybe the main thing is for is to help them practice grit: Yes, it’s hard. Just keep going. If you fail, fail as well as you can, and then try again.

We need to spend less time talking about literary techniques and more time talking about grit.

I’m still asking myself this question – “Is the academic paper the best way for students to demonstrate their learning?” – three years after publishing the original version of this post. In the interim, I’ve listened to the audiobook of Now You See It (discussed below), and I’m still not sure whether I’m onside with Davidson’s perspective. It seems to me that the academic paper has got to go, but something just as rigorous needs to take its place. Do you have thoughts on this?

Is the academic paper the best way for students to demonstrate their learning? Will learning to write papers help students develop the skills they will need later in their lives?

In Now You See It, Cathy N. Davidson asks “whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.” Davidson examines the roots of our contemporary education culture and suggests that we need to look back to pre-Industrial-Revolution models and forward to the murky future. As Virginia Heffernan explains, in her review of Davidson’s book (“Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade“) in the New York Times:

The contemporary American classroom, with its grades and deference to the clock, is an inheritance from the late 19th century. During that period of titanic change, machines suddenly needed to run on time. Individual workers needed to willingly perform discrete operations as opposed to whole jobs. The industrial-era classroom, as a training ground for future factory workers, was retooled to teach tasks, obedience, hierarchy and schedules. That curriculum represented a dramatic departure from earlier approaches to education. In “Now You See It,” Ms. Davidson cites the elite Socratic system of questions and answers, the agrarian method of problem-solving and the apprenticeship program of imitating a master. It’s possible that any of these educational approaches would be more appropriate to the digital era than the one we have now.

This is old news – education needs to be skills-based, collaborative, constructivist, blabla. However, Heffernan focuses particularly on Davidson’s discussion of the academic paper. After reading insightful, well-written student blogs and then being appalled by the quality of the same students’ research papers, Davidson began to wonder whether it was the form, not the students, that was at fault. After some research, Davidson concludes that, in Heffernan’s words,

Even academically reticent students publish work prolifically, subject it to critique and improve it on the Internet. This goes for everything from political commentary to still photography to satirical videos — all the stuff that parents and teachers habitually read as “distraction.”

I’m not, at first glance, convinced by this argument – we’ve all read the “work” published every day on the Internet, and in many cases its “prolificness” is one of its many problems. That said, I have students keep blogs in some of my courses, and I love them – you can SEE the learning happening as students wrestle with course topics and literature and relate them to their own experiences. I don’t do blogs in every course because a) I’m required to have them write a certain number of papers, and it can all get to be a bit too much for me, and b) the majority of my students have not received the time-consuming training in digital communication that Davidson says they need. However, if more space were made in the curriculum for online forms of writing, and we could limit the number of formal papers and make them an outgrowth of the online work, we might be on our way to something resembling “authentic learning tasks.”

I’ve been saying for a while that the research paper is going the way of the dinosaurs, and that we need to develop viable academic approaches to the blog and other online forms so that students can learn to write things that people actually read. (The fact that no one reads academic papers isn’t a new phenomenon, of course, but now we have an alternative that gives researchers a real potential audience.)

What is the place of the formal academic paper in the future of education? Should it continue to look the way it does now, or is it time to ask students to do something new?

When this post first went up in 2009, it was discovered by Sarah Ebner, then the editor of The Times UK’s education blog, School Gate. Her promotion drove up its stats, and it got shared around. Of note: Other than end-of-year roundups of favourite books and most-viewed posts, I have only done two “listicles” in this blog’s history – this one and the list of “10 Reasons I Hate Grading Your Assignment” – and both are in the top ten most viewed and most shared posts. I should probably learn something from this.

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10 Best Excuses for Missing Class That My Students Have Actually Given Me, For Real

10. My mother made me give my dog away three days ago and I haven’t stopped crying since then.

9. While driving to school, I fell asleep at the wheel. I pulled over and napped instead of coming to class.

8. My boyfriend was stabbed at a club on Saturday. He’s okay, but I’m finding it hard to concentrate on school right now.

7. A drug lord burned our house down.

6. I had to go visit my brother in jail.

5. My little sister locked me in my closet.

4. My bank card was cloned by the corner store up the street. They wiped out my bank account and I didn’t even have money for subway fare.

2. I’ve never met my father. On Friday, I saw an obituary in the paper for my paternal grandfather’s funeral. I contacted my dad through the funeral home. Since then, my father’s entire extended family has been harassing me on Facebook demanding to meet me. I haven’t told my mother. I’m having a nervous breakdown.

I’ve had some heated discussions about whether “cold calling” is good practice. When I posted about it a couple of years ago, the post got a lot of comments and got passed around a lot. What are your thoughts? Is it a good idea to spring questions on students out of the blue? Does it help them demonstrate mastery, or just provoke unnecessary anxiety?

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Are you willing to put your students on the spot?

A reader, Damommachef, has asked me to discuss the problem of the Constant Commenter. She says, “Some kids want to constantly comment, but the smartest are often the quietest. How can we get them more involved? How do we subdue the chronic commenters?”

One solution is the cold call. We call on students randomly (or perhaps not so randomly, but it may appear random to them.) If students raise hands or call out, we say, “I’m cold calling for this one, so no volunteers.”

A few years ago, a Masters teacher of mine said that she never cold-calls students because when she was a student, the idea of being “picked on” without warning made her sick with fear. She never put her students through it because she hated it so much. At first I was puzzled by this – Really? You never ask students for answers unless they volunteer? – but I then realized that I rarely cold-call in its strict sense. I often call on students, but usually they’ve had a chance to prepare responses beforehand, often with a partner or group so they don’t bear sole responsibility for their answers.

I’ve been reading Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov (thanks to my friend Sarah for the recommendation!) and he believes in real, honest-to-God cold-calling, asking students to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that they are mastering the skills and content they’re being taught, at a nanosecond’s notice. This technique, he explains, has several benefits.

…it allows you to check for understanding effectively and systematically…increases speed both in terms of your pacing…and the rate at which you cover material…[and] allows you to distribute work more broadly around the room and signal to students not only that they are likely to be called on to participate…but that you want to know what they have to say.

Lemov also encourages teachers to use techniques like “No Opt Out,” in which a student who answers with “I don’t know” must eventually give a correct answer, and “Format Matters,” meaning that students need to respond in complete, grammatical sentences whenever possible. In Lemov’s world, there is no escape: you need to be present, engaged and ready to respond at any time.

I am more inclined to Lemov’s view than my former teacher’s. At the beginning of the semester, I use the excuse that I need to learn their names, and call on them randomly from the attendance list to answer questions. As time goes on, though, I find myself getting soft, and allowing a few eager students to dominate discussion. And, as I said, I rarely ask students to think on their feet – if they’re nervous, they can just read answers they’ve prepared with their group, although they may have to stretch themselves if I ask for further explanation.

I feel like I should do it more. I believe that if students know they can be called on at any time, they will be more engaged and feel more responsibility for the material. I’d like to create an atmosphere in which students feel that it’s safe to make errors, but that they at least have to take a stab at things, and that they need to be ready to do so at all times. But I don’t want students to sit stewing in fear, petrified that they may be asked to speak.

Do you cold-call in your classroom? If so, how do you make students fell okay with that? If not, why not? Does cold-calling improve the classroom dynamic, or is it a detriment? I want my students to rise to the demands cold-calling creates, but I don’t want to poison their learning with terror.

One element of my job is teaching students how to analyze literary texts. One challenge of my job is that a large number of my students have little experience reading literary texts; a surprising number have never read a novel, for example, that wasn’t assigned to them in school. This creates two important problems:

A student with little practice in reading literature has much more difficulty developing analytical reading and writing skills.

A literature class that focuses solely on analysis is unlikely to inspire a student to read more widely, thus perpetuating the problem.

Is it more important for me to teach students literary analysis, even if they’re not ready for it, or to help them discover pleasure in reading that will then lead them to develop basic intuitive skills that will help them analyze? The latter seems like the obvious answer to me, but I still have a duty to prepare them explicitly for their English Exit Exam, which requires them to analyze a text. In wrestling with this problem, I developed the course that I outline below. My original post on this course is the fifth-most-widely-shared post in the history of this blog.

In the first part of the course, we all read The Glass Castle and discuss the genre of the personal narrative. We review elements of narrative (theme, plot, setting, character, imagery/symbolism) and they apply them to the memoir. We then do a short analytical essay in class based on a choice of unseen texts (I like using the “Lives” section of the New York Times magazine as a source for excellent very short personal narrative texts.)

Module 2: Book Talks

Texts: students have a course pack containing copies of the front cover, the back cover or inside flap, and the first chapter of eight book-length memoirs. I ask them to browse this pack and then tell me the three books they’d most like to read. For example, one term, I included the following texts:

I assign one book to each student, taking their preferences into account whenever possible. Each book is therefore read by a group of 4-5 students. Their major assignment for this module is a “book talk,” in which they must, as a group, present the book to the class and argue that their classmates SHOULD or SHOULD NOT choose this book as their final reading for the course. Each person is responsible for a 5-7 minute presentation on one of the following topics:

Theme: Identify an important theme in the memoir. Make sure you state your theme clearly and precisely. Then give evidence from the memoir to support your theme, WITHOUT GIVING THE WHOLE STORY AWAY. Why does the theme make/not make the book a worthwhile read?

Historical, geographical or social/cultural information: Describe the historical, geographical and social/cultural setting of the book (where, when, and in what social context it happens). Make sure you make direct connections between the facts you provide and the events of the book. Why does the setting of the memoir make/not make the book a worthwhile read?

Another element of the narrative: You may wish to discuss the author’s use of another literary element such as conflict, characterization or imagery, and how it helps us understand and appreciate the story. Why does the author’s use of this element make/not make the book a worthwhile read?

Personal connection: Choose a scene, character, event or idea in the memoir that you found particularly interesting and discuss why you related to it. Tell us about how this aspect of the book reflected events in your life, and why other people in the class might relate to it too. Make sure you are comfortable discussing this personal connection, and consider whether your audience will be comfortable hearing about it. Why do the personal connections we might make with this story make/not make the book a worthwhile read?

Other important information you learned: Tell the class about an important topic you learned about from reading this book. Why does learning about this topic make/not make the book a worthwhile read?

Difficulty: Tell the class about a challenge you had, and that they might have, in reading this book. Is it worthwhile for readers to take on this challenge and read all the way to the end?

What you loved: Tell the class about something else you loved about this book. Be detailed, but again, don’t give everything away. Why does this aspect of the book make/not make the book a worthwhile read?

At the end of each week, students must write a Book Talk Report about one of the two books presented that week. They explain what they learned about the book from the excerpt in their course pack and from the Book Talk. They must identify at least one important similarity between the book they saw presented and the book they are reading with their group. Will they consider choosing the book they saw presented as their third course reading?

Module 3: Comparison

Text: each student chooses another book from the list above.

Students must write an essay comparing the memoir they presented in their Book Talk to the memoir they have chosen for their third reading. In this module, we also look at examples of personal narrative in film (for example, Persepolis or Stories We Tell) and in radio/TV (This American Life).

Here’s a nice little post with a link about using a “layer cake” analogy to explain essay writing to students. I’ve never actually used this analogy, but apparently a bunch of other people have, because the original post got a LOT of shares. So if your students aren’t getting how to put an essay together, this might be something to try. You also might want to check the comments on the original, wherein readers share their own favourite tips for teaching essay structure.

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This week, I am working on essay structure with my post-intro students. After 22 years of teaching essay structure in various forms, I am, as you can imagine, sick of it. But then I came across this little analogy: how to bake your essay like a cake! It’s cute. It’s tasty. There are things here they might actually remember.

This got me thinking. A lot of you out there must have analogies that you use over and over in your classroom, because they work. Or maybe a teacher gave you an analogy years ago that you’ve never forgotten. Could you please share some of them here? That way, the rest of us can learn, steal, or just admire your ingenuity and that of the teachers you’ve known.